Sorry to change the recent flow of this, but I'm curious of the interview process you went through. How did it all work, how many interviews did you go through, did they "test" you, what was the toughest part/question? When I was working in Baltimore I got promoted a couple of times pretty quick and became a member of the interview team. I always felt awkward interviewing someone else and then trying to judge the "talent" they had in a 30-60 minute talk. I tried to just feel if they would fit in with our current team more than test technical ability.

PensHckyFan79 wrote:Sorry to change the recent flow of this, but I'm curious of the interview process you went through. How did it all work, how many interviews did you go through, did they "test" you, what was the toughest part/question? When I was working in Baltimore I got promoted a couple of times pretty quick and became a member of the interview team. I always felt awkward interviewing someone else and then trying to judge the "talent" they had in a 30-60 minute talk. I tried to just feel if they would fit in with our current team more than test technical ability.

They brought 5 people here, 4 of which interviewed me. There were 4 separate 30-45 minute interviews where I was asked a variety of technical questions. All of the questions were practical, none of those weird "Why is a man hole cover round" kind of questions. The toughest questions were when they asked about solving a specific hard problem (If you were to implement tail (unix command), how would you do it?), which are solved but were not solved in a 30 minute interview.

The goal of those questions, as I've read a lot about them and heard from someone there, is not to see if you can solve the problem, but for you to demonstrate your problem solving abilities. They are interested in what steps you take, how you attack the problem, and your thought process.

Some parts of it were just casual talking about lifestyle there and probably trying to see how I'd fit into the team.

I don't know which kinds of positions you interview for, but there are a lot of articles out there about how when interviewing for a programming position, the best questions are simple questions (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FizzBuzzTest) - You're not going to be able to accurately gauge how "talented" someone is in 30-45 minutes, but you should be able to get a good idea of whether they can do the job, and if they would fit in to the culture.